Upthread someone posted a link to a South Australia forum at ancestry.com. I looked at that and several pages there and this is what I found. The Book series numbers seem to run from 1 to 999, then from 1A to 999A, and then presumably from 1B to 999B. Actual examples seem to end at 1928 according to a knowledgeable poster there mentioning that offhand. Presumably that’s for security reasons so that any living person would have to now be over 80, i.e. they don’t want the site used for identity theft.
The birth registry sequences are different from marriages and deaths. The birth registry examples I saw for the Hin (Hindmarsh) district ranged from mid-1800s I believe, but I looked at about 12 from the 1900s only for specifics. The earliest was a Sep 20, 1900 birth that was Book 664 Page 157, while the latest was an Aug 12, 1928 birth that was Book 216A Page 581. That Page 581 was the highest page number I saw for any of the birth entries. The second highest was from 1911, a Book 872 Page 380 entry.
From 1900 to 1928, the Books per year averaged about 20. The rate of Book usage per year did not seem to increase during this period, in fact the last couple of years it was slightly less by a book a year or so.
To reach Book 44B by 1959, the next 31 year period, the rate of Book usage would have to have increased. To get from Book 216A in that 1928 example, to 44B in 1959, that would require 827 books (assuming 999A then skips to 1B). It’s 999 + 44 - 216 = 827 books, and 827/31 = 26.7 Books per year.
So it’s plausible that we get to Book 44B in 1959, but how we get to page 5733 of Book 44B is difficult to imagine. They would have had to change their system of page numbering. For example if the entire B series was sequential, 5733/44 would get us to about 130 Pages per Book, which is too low based on the 1900-1928 period. I can’t see why they would change their system that they’d been using since the mid-1800s anyway. So the Page 5733 is a problem until that gets explained.
Both Australia and Kenya would have been Colonies of Britain when these Registry systems started, so it’s entirely plausible that they used the same Book and Page approach to record keeping. Australia became independent in 1901 based on Wiki, and their numbering system was continuous, so Kenya’s being continuous makes sense as well. It also makes sense that the forms may have looked similar.
One thing we know for certain, and that’s at least one of the documents (Bomford or Obama) has been forged to look like the other. They could both be bogus, but one has been designed to look like the other right down to the four smoking gun duplicate fields: Registrar, District Registrar, Book number, and Page number. In at least one of the two documents, those fields are forged and conceivably even the Bomford who’s vouched for the Birth Certificate being his would never remember what those were. He’d just see his name and family tree information and so on and say “yep, that’s mine”.
So it still remains plausible that the Kenyan document is genuine, and an otherwise authentic Bomford document (in terms of the actual data that matters) simply had the four fields and a few format changes to match the Kenyan document and thereby discredit it. The Kenyans may have used a different page numbering system where the entire B series did get up to 5733 for example, because for them at the time 130 pages per book works whereas for the Australians it’s too low.
A few other curiosities of the Bomford document that haven’t been mentioned. The No. field up top is 2. Why so low? That field seems a more logical place to have a higher number like 47,044 on the Kenyan document. Depending how many entries are listed on each page of the B series for example, and this is page 5733, maybe it’s 8 or 9 listed per page and that was the 47,044th birth in the B series. But 2 in that field? As I joked in another forum it’s like this guy was on Gilligan’s Island and the Skipper got assigned 1 and Gilligan got 2 at the lagoon registry office. It seems too low a number. The 2 also seems a bit different (barely discernible, e.g. a little more curved in the cenral part and perhaps a bit longer top to bottom) than one below in the 62 address number. The reason a forger might have put 2 here is to distinguish it from the 47,044 that they’d been ridiculing. Same with the E.F. Lavender. They didn’t want to keep that so they changed it to G.F., which isn’t a soap (a totally bogus nit anyway).
The G.F. Lavender is also the only entry down the page that’s alligned to the left of other entries above and below it. Odd, since it’s one of the 4 smoking gun fields as to which of these documents is copying the other. The r in Lavender also looks different in the upper right than other r letters in the vicinity. It seems to lack a darker point at the tip or smudge if you want to call it that.
In the upper right of both documents is the Page number duplicated as well. On Bomford the 5733 looks noticeably crisper than other numbers in the vicinity. These anomalies suggest Photoshopping in the smoking gun fields needed to incriminate the Kenyan document. At the bottom where the signature is, that whole section may have looked a bit different on the Bomford original, which is why we see anomalies there like print floating over and unaffected by the creases.
None of which is definitive, but I think the key here is that the hack would at its core be trivial. They want to discredit the Kenyan document, so all they needed is a plausible fit, i.e., some place that used the same British Colonial numbering system. Either find an ancestry site dormant and stupid enough to have a living person’s birth certificate up, or somebody volunteers. Then you put up or leave the real name and other information in place, but most importantly insert the four obscure smoking gun fields and say “Aha!”. Even the original owner might not be part of it, though that can’t be ruled out here. Ideally from the hacker-loon’s point of view, you’d want him to be part of it. If he isn’t, he might debunk you by just looking at his own copy more closely and proving you fudged the four fields. Literally anyone else born in Hindmarsh district around that time would also be able to debunk the Bomford document on those four fields, but to be challenge-proof it would have to involve some independent person(s) and ideally the registry office vouching for it. Otherwise it becomes he said versus he/she said.
It ought to be possible to find out, definitively, since unlike Kenya or Hawaii one presumes Adelaide, Australia and its suburb Hindmarsh, would be willing to engage in massive transparency here. Their registry office doesn’t even have to confirm anything specific about Bomford. Just have two or three officials up the chain of authority there tell us what period Book 44B spans and how many page numbers it has. If April 10, 1959 and Page 5733 falls within that, the Kenyan document is forged and the lawyer was almost certainly set up by her source. The E.F. Lavender joke (changing G to E) and the 47,044 and the Republic of Kenya, even though none of those were implausible, would make sense as the hacker/forger-loon just having fun, but no sense at all for a birther to be doing that and being stupid enough to keep the Book and Page number for example. Especially given how quikly it would have been “debunked”, the debunker and perpetrator would almost certainly have some connection, though perhaps the tip could have been relayed anonymously.
This is my first post to the site. I normally post to Usenet, but this issue was so inside freepdom that I registered and posted this here. One of your most trusted freepers should try to identify and contact the registry office in charge of the Hindmarsh (it’s again a suburb of Adelaide based on a Google search) district in South Australia. No long distance charges that way. Then if they’re willing to answer the question on the 44B Book range and page range, you report back here and because you’re a longtime trusted freeper everyone else here believes it. You can then move on knowing whether the Bomford document was at least tampered with or not. I have no idea who you’d want to be your Fearless Leader representative because I haven’t read the site enough.
Good post, welcome
The No. field up top is 2. Why so low? That field seems a more logical place to have a higher number like 47,044 on the Kenyan document. Depending how many entries are listed on each page of the B series for example, and this is page 5733, maybe it’s 8 or 9 listed per page and that was the 47,044th birth in the B series. But 2 in that field? As I joked in another forum it’s like this guy was on Gilligan’s Island and the Skipper got assigned 1 and Gilligan got 2 at the lagoon registry office. It seems too low a number.
Okay, that IS very curious. But a little bit of digging on the web comes up with a reason.
Although Hindmarsh apparently contains quite a large stadium, it appears to be a very minute subdivision of the Adelaide area. In terms of actual residents who live there, multiple sources give the 2006 Hindmarsh population as 127.
But we're not done here yet. The father is listed as living in Thebarton, another neighborhood which is literally across the street from Hindmarsh. Recent population of Thebarton is 1,327.
But those are RECENT stats. What was the population of these areas in 1959? Fifty years ago? Probably much lower. In 1866, it was 450. Maybe 700 in 1959?
So let's maybe throw in West Hindmarsh, and estimate a 1959 population of 1,000 for the lot.
Out of 1000 residents (presumably approximately 500 females of ALL ages), how many will give birth in a given year?
If the average female bears approximately two children, and lives to be 75, the odds of the average female bearing a child in a given year are about 2 out of 75.
Work this out, and you'll see we might expect an AVERAGE of 12 or 13 children to be born in Hindmarsh district each year. Some years it would be more, some would be less.
Suddenly it becomes much less mysterious that David, born 3-1/3 months into the year, is child #2. More typically we would expect him to be child #3 or child #4, but having child #2 or child #5 - based on the stats we have - for Hindmarsh district in mid April would not seem to be at all unusual.
So once again, what at first appears to as if it might be an anomaly on the Aussie certificate, looked at more closely, checks out.
As an aside, does this mean a number of 44,677 (or 44,077) is improbable for Mombasa? Not necessarily. Mombasa is a huge city, with 700,000+ population. And the numbering might be from the beginning of their records rather than per year, per district.
On Bomford the 5733 looks noticeably crisper than other numbers in the vicinity. These anomalies suggest Photoshopping in the smoking gun fields needed to incriminate the Kenyan document.
I read it differently. On the Kenyan doc, the 5733 is so blurry you really can't even positively ID it as a 5733. As for its being darker than some of the other letters (I presume you have 10th April, 1959 as a reference), I think I have an idea about that.
I've tried typing on an old manual typewriter. A lot of what you accomplish is due to finger strength, and it varies by finger. All of the 5, 7, and 3 keys are struck by strong fingers. The 1, 0 and 9 are all struck by weak fingers. Moreover, the typist would have first spaced, then struck the 4 single characters very deliberately, versus flying over words like "HINDMARSH" etc. at a higher rate of speed.
Nonetheless, the simple fact is that there was variation in darkness of type on the old manual typewriters. This can be clearly seen in the word "Community" just below the "5733" - it's uncontested and is equally dark.
In fact, if you examine the word "Community," it shares the exact same characteristics as "5733." If we assume "5733" was Photoshopped on the basis of its crispness, then we must also assume the word "Community" was Photoshopped... but that other words in the same phrase were not.
Since that leads to an obvious absurdity, I conclude that the premise must be wrong.
It ought to be possible to find out, definitively, since unlike Kenya or Hawaii one presumes Adelaide, Australia and its suburb Hindmarsh, would be willing to engage in massive transparency here. Their registry office doesn’t even have to confirm anything specific about Bomford. Just have two or three officials up the chain of authority there tell us what period Book 44B spans and how many page numbers it has. If April 10, 1959 and Page 5733 falls within that, the Kenyan document is forged and the lawyer was almost certainly set up by her source.
Yes, I agree. Someone rather authoritative ought to contact Adelaide.
By the way, don't think that because I disagree with some of your conclusions I regard them as not valuable. On the contrary, you've made some very good points here.
Oh, and welcome to FreeRepublic! I hope you enjoy and benefit from your reading and interaction here. :-)
Thanks for the thoughtful post, and welcome!